Sometimes those commercials are just too much for me. You know the ones— maybe they’re trying to motivate you to give money for starving children or shelter for homeless animals. Whatever the end result, they try to get you there by showing you pictures that are guaranteed to break your heart. And they do it because it works! We are visual people and it helps us to see the need and visualize the difference we could make. When we sponsor a child overseas, we want to see their face. When we reunite with an old friend online, the first thing we want to do is virtually flip through their photo album. Seeing the face connects us with the heart.
But foster children often go unseen.
Photo by Rebecca Tredway Photography
There are privacy regulations that keep foster parents from sharing photographs or information about the lives and history of their foster child. And this is wise! When dealing with the frustrations of foster care, I always try to put myself in the position of the biological parent. Would I want our most private family struggles to become public information? Would I want pictures out in the world that showed my child as part of another family? Would I be okay with the face of my most precious treasure becoming the poster child for abuse and neglect? Of course not. Every child in foster care potentially represents a mother and father who are struggling or may have already given up. While as foster parents we may be proud of the work we’re doing and the child we love, we recognize that we don’t own their story and that someday they have a right to tell it in the way that feels right to them.
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